For 14 years, the Peruvian-born Descalzi was the Ted Koppel of Spanish-language television, an erudite talk-show host and correspondent, making crisp reports from Washington, Central America and the Persian Gulf. But in 1994, he sold his last Italian suit for drug money and disappeared into the streets of Washington, D.C. Descalzi now admits to a crack habit, but he insists that his fall was a philosophical journey to “erase the tyranny of the self”–a contention that casts doubt on his much-celebrated resurrection. At the luncheon, Descalzi delivers a sermon on humility and the false escape of drugs. The crowd erupts: “We love you, Guillermo.” But a voice calls from the darkness: “No nos defraude” (“Don’t cheat us”). Descalzi shoots back, “How am I going to cheat you when the whole world is watching?”

The sensible answer is: the same way he did so often before. Millions in the Latin world watched Descalzi for more than a decade, but had no inkling of the demons that tormented him. His drug problems began soon after he came to the United States for college in 1966 (“I inhaled,” he says), but they accelerated with his growing fame. In the 1980s, when he was the chief Washington correspondent for Univision, his cocaine use became widely known among journalists. “He was a vacuum,” says one colleague. By September 1994, Descalzi had been in and out of treatment programs–and jobs. The U.S.-based Univision and Telemundo networks let him go after a series of on-air gaffes and embarrassing incidents. And NBC fired him from his $160,000-per-year position after he flew into a drunken rage in front of network executives. His 26-year-old son, Javier, recalls seeing him stumbling through his apartment, spooked by imaginary spies, his bare feet bloodied on the broken glass pipes he used to binge on crack.

Within days, Descalzi was living on the streets–just where he says he wanted to be. Descalzi contends that he got fed up with the “egolatry” of his celebrity life. “There came a realization that I had to stage a coup d’tat,” he says. “I had to bring myself down.” And down he went in a fit of self-absorption. Covered with dirt and a raffish beard, Descalzi became a fixture in Washington’s heavily Latino Adams-Morgan district. He bummed money from his old Latino friends, returning to a burned-out shell of a mansion to get high. He showed flashes of altruism, once buying crack for a prostitute so she wouldn’t have to turn a trick. But at the same time, he abandoned his family –even those, like Javier, who desperately tried to help.

Salvation finally came, on cue, from television. Pedro Sevcec, a Telemundo talk-show host, interviewed Descalzi in late December and managed to get his former colleague–by this time, frostbitten and nearly skeletal–off the streets. “I went too far,” Descalzi says. His resurrection, after just three weeks in a rehab clinic, was unveiled in a prime-time Telemundo special on Feb. 1. Now a reporter for the network’s tabloid news show, “Ocurrio Asi” (“That’s How It Happened”), Descalzi is sober, cleanshaven–and in a hurry. “We’re doing drugs today,” he says, smiling. In the studio, he watches himself on screen, talking to a class of third graders. “The problem of drugs is the problem of those who don’t have peace,” he tells them. “Above all, it is a lie to yourself.” What the children do not know is that Descalzi has already fallen again. Two days after the Sevcec show aired, Descalzi went back to Washington, using a $500 Telemundo advance to buy shoes for his friends and crack for himself. The relapse scared Descalzi, and gave life to the voice that still hangs in the air: “No nos defraude.”